


The Theseus Hare

by Scarlett Sutcliff-Michaelis (lunamoon303)



Series: CRverse [1]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Animal Death, Cannibalism, Child Soldiers, Dehumanization, Gore, Human Experimentation, Medical Trauma, Multi, Needles, Other, Physical Abuse, Solitary Confinement, drug abuse/addiction
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-24
Updated: 2019-08-24
Packaged: 2020-09-25 04:53:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,346
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20371003
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lunamoon303/pseuds/Scarlett%20Sutcliff-Michaelis
Summary: "All the world will be your enemy, prince with a thousand enemies. And whenever they catch you, they will kill you. But first, they must catch you, digger, listener, runner, prince with a swift warning. Be cunning, and full of tricks, and your people will never be destroyed"





	The Theseus Hare

**Author's Note:**

> Welcome to the Cyber-Resistance universe; a collection of fandoms and OCs where everything is bullshit and the canon doesn't matter, my name is Siscar and I'll be your host on this journey into weirdness. 
> 
> This is a novelization/rework of my roleplay blog on tumblr so things are gonna get super weird
> 
> Tags will be updated as new chapters are added

The world is Ending.

The sky is a mirror, broken, reflecting everything that ever was and everything that will ever be within shards of Dreams that fall like silver rain and distort the landscape around you as they crash haphazardly to the ground, like glass meteors, shattering on impact. Glittering splinters of impossibility cut your cheek as they fly by, you can taste the bitterness of your future in the pain. 

Before you stands the End-of-Everything, with a head wreathed in flame, its serpentine form stretching away into forever. Nothing around it burns or even smolders, no, it _ grows _. Patches of green swallow impossible structures, strangling their foundations until they lean dangerously, drunkenly across the deserted street you stand on. Plants spring forth from places they were never meant to, devouring everything they touch like a cancer, they tug at your feet as you walk. Moss and vines try to crawl up your legs, only to be torn apart with each solemn step. 

In your hand is a sword. An old and heavy thing, carved from the bones of a beast Higher than you, the tip drags across the seething wasteland of invasive life and makes it wither. You are tired and alone, but you cannot rest until it is done.

The End-of-Everything hisses as you draw near, and speaks in seven times seven tongues, “Do you know who I am?” it says, in a choir of voices like a forest on fire. There is an edge of frustration to its tone, as if it were just as tired as you. You stare at it with empty eyes, it has asked you this question more times than you can readily remember, and each time, you have failed to answer correctly. 

Stubbornly, you clutch your blade white-knuckle and it grows lighter in your hand. Just a hair, just a touch, but you can feel the weight leave as the dying embers of your resolve glow just a little brighter. 

“You are me.” 

The End-of-Everything cranes its endless neck down until its burning face is but a foot away, “Cute… but wrong answer.”

You open your mouth to protest but your words become rose petals on your tongue. Flowers bloom in your throat as the endless growth leaps forth to claim you. You can't breathe, gagging on blossoms, the sharp iron tang of blood rises with the plants in your chest as you choke on their thorns.

Your vision swims and you start to sway, the black dots dancing before your eyes pitching left. You fall like a tree at the hands of a lumberjack, utterly disappointed but not surprised. 

\---

Crashing to the cold, hard floor of your dorm in the middle of the night is somehow still a gentler wake-up call than you've had in the past.

As you lie there, cheek pressed against the filthy grate that makes up most of the floor, you fight to catch your breath and wait for the pain in your chest to subside. It smells vile and damp down here, but at least it’s cooler… _ ish _ than the rest of the cramped space you live in. Rolling onto your back, you stare up at the darkened ceiling, listening to the sounds of your sleeping dorm-mates, wondering if you should try sleeping again. 

You don't know what time it is, but judging by how quiet everyone else is you probably haven't been asleep for very long. That’s nothing new, you've always been a “bad sleeper”, with bags under your eyes, struggling to fall back into fitful dreams just in time for the alarm to go off and leave you fatigued.

Something long and ropey slithers across the back of your hand and you barely swallow the scream rushing to make itself known. Lidless yellow eyes glow in the darkness, flickering and dim, like old fluorescent lights. A hand reaches out to touch your face, cold and dirty fingers brushing the softness of your cheeks, curving gently upwards to touch your eyelids, your nose, before sinking into the near-matted mass of your hair. The hand works its way through the tangles, brushing against the ugly scar tissue barely hidden your curls. A voice wavers from the shadows, modulated and sleepy.

“That snake dream again?” whispers Squeaker, your best friend. Her words have a color to them, and a shape you can see. Most sounds do. Feelings… feelings are different, some you can taste. It’s hard to explain. There's a word for it you think, one that you can't remember, for your condition… your _ abnormality _. 

You're not supposed to acknowledge it, the way you feel things. It singles you out, and makes you a target.

_ There is safety in being normal. _

_ In being _ ** _boring._ **

You nod beneath Squeaker's fingers, and you can see her concern turn her words to bruises. 

“Ah… failed again?”

Another nod.

More concern 

“...I’m so sorry, Jack, I thought we had it this time.” she starts to pull her hand away, but you press your head into her palm.

“It’s ok, there’s always next time.” a lie, but a sweet one. Next times are never guaranteed, nothing is guaranteed. But you smile at her anyway, you pick yourself up off the floor, and crawl back into your rigid, uncomfortable bunk. Your pillow crinkles beneath your head, the lumps of paper and rags inside it shifting underneath your weight. 

You watch Squeaker’s eyes flicker in the dark, staring at you from her spot near the floor, you’re too far away to whisper now.

She falls asleep first, eyes going dark without fanfare, while you stay awake and gaze into the darkened corners of the dorm. 

You count the empty bunks, the ones you aren't supposed to talk about. You can't tell if there are more or less than usual, and that uncertainty unsettles you. 

You're not supposed to care about the ones that go missing, you’re not supposed to make friends, you're not supposed to stand out. 

These, harsh as they are, are the rules of survival. Cold and unspoken, dictated long ago by others that aren't here anymore, and you've broken them all just by existing. 

The morning creeps up on you. True to form, you start to fall asleep moments before the alarm tears through the dorm and everyone rushes to get ready for the day.

The overhead lights come on with a crackling whine that sets your teeth on edge, bathing the rusty expanse of your home in a harsh off-blue brightness. You lay there in bed and watch the others begin their solemn march towards the showers, if you can call them showers. Towards the back of the rusty tube you live in is a row of faucets that spew scalding hot, or ice cold water, depending on which way you turn the knob. It doesn't matter if it's in the “middle”, the water comes out at a harsh temperature regardless. 

There aren't any curtains or dividers, everyone is forced to wash in front of everybody else. The showers kill any preconceived notions of modesty or privacy that any newcomers may have when they get here.

That and the fact that almost nobody wears any clothes. After all, there's no point in hiding what you don't have.

They’ve taken everything from you, piece by piece, bit by bit, and replaced it with metal. It doesn't matter what you looked like before you got here, they made you look like everyone else in time.

Everyone, mostly everyone, here is like that. Shambling collections of mismatched cybernetics, some obsolete and broken, others prototypes in need of rigorous testing and modifications. A pack of broken dolls, content to be taken apart, over and over again.

That is what you are for.

That is why you are here.

To test and be tested.

Until you are no longer useful, and they make you go away.

You try to be useful. You try to be plain. This place _ hurts _but it's the only home you've ever known. The useless go missing, just like the abnormal. 

You don't want to go missing. 

Not now, not ever.

You don't shower today, you just lie there and wait until it is time to be collected. 

The others mill by the door, waiting for it to be unlocked, smelling like the astringent excuse for soap you are all given. The newcomers look uncomfortable, fleshy bodies wrapped in the thin, ugly garments that are standard issue for newcomers. They look too soft, too healthy to be here, and you find yourself hating them for the hope in their eyes. The last traces of sun on their skin.

The door opens with a hollow rattling that shatters your contemplation, and drags you from your bunk. All thoughts of sleep are forgotten as you join the others and make your way to the facility.

\---  


As you file out into the stark whiteness of the facility, you are met by an angular sliver of a man. Tall and thin with sharp features, clutching a clipboard in his gloved hands, the coldness of his pale, blue eyes is just as disarming and bleak as the blankness of the hallways around you. If you weren't numb to it all by now, you'd be trembling like the newcomers, but there is nothing left for you to feel besides exhausted apathy. You just want to sleep in peace.

The badge on the man’s chest declares that his name is Henry Strord. He is your ‘handler’, supposedly in charge of your care and feeding. But, in truth, he considers himself a god among vermin, blessing you with his presence each morning as he counts who did and did not make it to see the dawn, he doesn't even see you as a person.

Just an obligation, a mewling mouth to feed, another head to count every morning. 

For all intents and purposes, the moment anyone comes to the facility, they stop being a person and start being a tool to be used and eventually discarded.

A specimen. 

A subject. 

Strord, like the rest of The Personnel will do anything to make hurting you easy, including taking your name. If you don’t have a name, then you are no different from the rats they do worse things to. That’s what the older specimens say.  
  
Therefore, another rule you must keep; never forget your name. If you never had one, you must make one up, it doesn’t matter if it is a real name like Jane or Rose, or something like Squeaker, or Eights, or Jack. As long as the name is yours.

Strord calls out numbers, one by one, making bored little tick marks on his clipboard when the appropriate people answer. The numbers that are met with the same silence as empty bunks in the dorm are not mourned by anyone, least of all him. If they wanted to stick around they should have been more useful, less abnormal.

It’s no skin off his nose. This is just work to him, you assume he gets paid regardless of how he treats you. 

Strord gnaws on the end of his pen, flipping through the papers on his clipboard idly. It’s easy to tell that he doesn’t want to be here doing this, just as much as the rest of you. But that isn’t going to stop him from being an ass about it. 

“Alright then,” He opens his mouth to speak, then closes it, squinting at the paper. He flips it back and forth a few times, glancing up at the row of specimens before him. He swallows, seemingly nervous about something, “u-uh…”

That… has never happened before, or if it has, you can’t remember it. Strord has never been nervous about anything. Brash, disagreeable, arrogant, yes. But nervous?

That was better left up to the specimens, you and those like you who were doomed to wait on the knife’s edge of fate every morning, unsure if you’d be gone with nothing to your name but an empty bunk in a filthy rusted tube. 

He catches you staring, something on your face must have reflected concern, or worse, pity. Strord straightens to his full height, smoothing out his papers.

“Specimens 6544, 9072, 7395,” a pause, a glance at your direction, a vague flash of teeth that turns his oily grey words to a smogy black, “and 7886, report to lab 34-A for testing.”

You can taste the spite in his tone. How dare any of his worthless charges show pity for the great Henry Strord. You shall be punished for your inolence. Like always.

You don’t put up a fight. Really, how would you? Why would you.

When the Sentries lumber out of the brightened hallways to escort you, you don’t flinch when their slimy canine maws close around your hand and they start dragging you away. Stiffly, as they march you along the sterile corridors, you watch them move, mutated and brutish, they are walking slabs of muscle vaguely shaped like dogs, with wires snaking across their skin like bulging veins. They are the prized pets of the Personnel with teeth strong enough to crumple the most advanced cybernetics like pop cans. And the sounds of their barks are enough to nearly blind you with amber spiderwebs of sound.

To say that you don’t like the Sentries would be a graphic understatement. They've chased you down before, more than once, and left their teeth marks on your mods. You still have nightmares about their breath on your neck. They’re tall enough to look you square in the eyes, and vicious enough to snap your head clean off your shoulders. 

You stare at them for the majority of the trip, not bothering to look back at the other specimens in your group. Not bothering to look forward either. There’s nothing to see. Just mile after mile of blank, featureless hallways, and sterile smells. Sometimes you’ll hear something awful coming from a room you can’t see, and that noise will be the only color in this place.

Personnel appear and disappear almost at random, melting into the walls like magic, faceless and strange. You see them every day but they never get any less weird or unsettling. Most Personnel, unlike Strord, don’t exist from the neck up. There’s no other way to describe it.

The lab you are lead to is calm, quiet, and clean. The sharp scent of industrial cleaners and antiseptic coats your tongue and dries your mouth. It’s cold here, the same way doctor’s offices are cold. The kind of cold that latches onto your fear and gives you goosebumps.

Or would give you goosebumps, if you had enough skin for that, but you don’t. 

The other specimens mill around anxiously, shivering, casting glances around the room as if looking for somewhere to escape to. You just sort of stand there, numbly wiping Sentry spit off of your hand. There are divots in the metal, new ones barely distinguishable from the old ones. 

The scientist in charge of whatever experiment you will soon be subjected to doesn’t keep you waiting long. Their lack of face and voluminous labcoat only serves to further cast the scientist, and the rest of the Personnel, into the depths of species and gender ambiguity. 

Gloved hands roll up long sleeves, revealing more protective latex that works its way up past the elbows. You and the others are sterilized and examined with fingers somehow colder than the lab itself. Apprehension coats your tongue like vinegar as you are thoroughly sprayed with something weird smelling. They just let you drip onto the floor as you are poked and prodded, posed before a camera. They pin your hair out of your face and take picture after picture.

Other scientists scuttle in to help. They look over your mods with interest, touching the tips of your rabbitlike ears, just to watch them flick. Lifting your legs to study your clumsy metal paws. You are lost to a sea of grasping hands and excited chatter. What skin you have left calls out to be torn off.

_ Stop touching me _

** _Stop touching me_ **

** _STOP TOUCHING ME_ **

“Which specimen is this?” the first scientist says to another, leafing through a folder full of papers

“7886, I think?” replies a taller scientist, his fingers roughly parting your hair so his companions can document the scars on his scalp.

The first scientist hangs back, the blurred void where her head should be tilts this way and that, “How curious, I’ve never seen mods like these before.”

“They’re prototypes for the Alice in Cyberland movie merch corporate tried to push years ago, never quite got off the ground though.” fingers are snapped close to both your ears, prompting oohs and ahhs when they flick away from the noise automatically. Though your left ear is somewhat damaged, it still tries its best.

One scientist pulls your head back, so you can look him where his face should be, “How long have you been a rabbit, kid?”

You are forced onto a table and strapped down. The Personnel never stop taking pictures, never stop touching you. Perhaps they like watching you squirm. As they lower some kind of overhead examination light, you lose sight of the other specimens.

You can’t see anything like this, nothing but vague shadows and gloved hands. The flash of needles and other implements among the brightness. There is suddenly no sound, nothing but your own hyperventilating, and the panic hammering in your chest, giving a new urgency to your writhing. There isn’t enough bare skin anywhere else but your head and neck, so you have the hideous misfortune of watching the needle approach before you feel it in your skin.

Whatever was in that syringe burns your veins like acid. You cry out in pain loud enough to make the Personnel flinch back. Your body feels like it’s on fire, every inch of you seethes with pain.

Your mouth is awash with the sickly butterscotch sweetness of agony, and all you can do is scream.

And scream.

And scream.

You don’t sound human anymore, no, more like some kind of overworked machine on it’s last fucking legs begging to be repaired or put down. But you will receive neither mercy. The Personnel pin you down and jab you with another needle, shouting in panicked voices you can’t parse. After that, the pain doesn’t stop as much as it just _ slows. _ The same way the world starts to. Your vision swims and liquifies, darkness gathering at the edges until there is nothing but black and silence, and slow… slow pain.

  
\---

When you wake up, you’re somewhere soft, somewhere small. 

The walls, the floor, the ceiling are all plush and warm. Somewhere, soft music is playing, filling the air with staticky little sparkles. Trying to stand is a bad idea, but you do it anyway, weakly bracing yourself against the squishy walls. You press your face to the glass window embedded in what’s probably the door to this little room. 

Beyond the softness of your new cage is a room full of monitors and keyboards, staffed by a single member of the Personnel. Though your vision is blurry, you can see other doors, ones that rattle violently as the strange things within attempt to get out. The Personnel doesn’t seem bothered by this at all, but sometimes they’ll press a button, and the doors will stop shaking.

You quietly decide that you don’t want to find out just what exactly that button does. 

For awhile, you just watch the room, and your reflection, studying the faint features of your face. You can’t remember the last time you got a look at yourself, the Personnel don’t allow mirrors in the dorms. Supposedly they’re afraid the specimens would hurt themselves. So, the most you’ve ever gotten was your distorted face in new mods or shiny implements. 

You aren’t pretty, not by a long shot. Your warm brown skin is pale and sickly looking. The rest of you is dangerously thin and dirty, with a matted, tangled cloud of blonde hair that falls in front of your eyes. Eyes that are sunken, swallowed up by heavy bags from your many sleepless nights. Eyes that look wrong. One is a shoddy replacement cybernetic in dire need of an upgrade, but the other one, your real one glows faintly in the reflection, making you look otherworldly. Your hands fly up to your face and dread runs its fingers down your spine. What did they do to you?

You remember the burning, the needles and that cold cold fear, the same fear that grips you now. You don’t scream, you just sink to your knees as nausea and vertigo drag you down. None of this feels right, not of it feels real. 

Digging your fingers into your hair, you struggle to pull yourself together, but you pull your hands away from your scalp covered in something bright blue and metallic smelling. Blood, is this blood? Is that YOUR blood?? Your hands aren’t hands anymore, they’re talons. Wicked and birdlike, they gleam with glowing blue blood.

This--

This isn’t you, this CAN’T be you. This can’t be your body.

The more you stare, the more your hands change, into something sharp and deadly. A shadowy stain of change worms its way up your arms, consuming metal as if it were nothing.

Now you find your voice, now you scream. But the sound that leaves you is the roar of a beast, frantic and afraid. You claw at the door with tears in your eyes, tears that glow like your blood.

“What is happening to me, why are you doing this?” you try to scream, but all that comes out is howls and snarls. Your claws leave ragged furrows in the fabric walls of your prison as you try and fail to dig your way out. 

You catch a glimpse of yourself in the monitors, the thing that you are now grows more eyes just to stare helplessly at the camera. The Personnel at the desk presses the button and your room is filled with hissing and sweet sweet smells. The world turns to syrup again, and the panic melts away as you sink to the floor watching the sparkles of music dance through the darkness behind your many many eyelids.

Alarms drag you from the drugged euphoria of dreamless sleep and cast you into a world of flashing red lights and instant panic. 

You are yourself again, at least. Trembling and afraid, hugging your knees on the ruined floor as the lights keep blinking and the alarms keep screaming. What’s wrong? What’s happening??

Did something get out?

Did something get IN?

You don’t know but you’re ever hesitant to peek through the window. Your reflection is no less ugly than you left it, but the glow of your eye is even brighter and more pervasive than before. You shut your eyes for a second and take a trembling breath, a weak attempt to steady yourself. Outside the window, everything is dark except for the blinking red lights, and the Personnel at the static-filled monitors is panicking.

You watch them pace and throw things and press buttons to no avail. The other doors aren’t rattling anymore. You pretend not to see the neon colors spattered against their windows. 

The Personnel person catches sight of you, up and awake. You guess that they must have thought you were dead. They grab something from the desk, something shiny and dangerous.

A gun.

As childish as you sound sometimes, you are well aware of death and guns. It’s impossible not to be in a place like this. 

They point the gun at you with trembling hands.

Something must have gone wrong with the others.

They must have been put down.

You swallow thickly, tensing up as that same shadowy stain spreads from your fingertips, slowly making its way up your arms. Your teeth grow sharp in your mouth as the Personnel approaches.

You don’t want to die here.

It happens faster than before, the changing. It doesn’t hurt or even tingle, you just feel like you and then you don’t.

You grow to fill your tiny cell and stare at your wouldbe murderer with too many eyes. You ram your body against the door hard enough to make them flinch, hard enough to make the material start to buckle.

Get out 

Get out

GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT

Again and again, you don’t stop until you can get a claw in the ever widening gap between the door and the outside. A bullet grazes your knuckles, you just snarl and continue on. The sound the door makes when you rip it off its hinges is almost as blinding as the constant alarms. 

Another bullet buries itself in your shoulder and you SCREAM. The taste of butterscotch is nauseating and all consuming as you lunge towards your attacker.

You can taste their fear just as easily as you can taste your own, buttery and alluring. Your teeth clamp down on the writhing, blurred shape of the Personnel attacking you, and you are met with the bitter iron tang of blood as something crunches between your jaws. The fear-taste melts away, replaced by only dull butterscotch aches and blood. The Personnel has stopped moving, stopped trying to shoot you. So you spit them out onto the floor.

You shake your head, pawing at your face and eyes, trying to wipe off the blood smeared there. Something falls out of your real eye, plinking on the ground. A tiny pink-tinted contact lense, trailing a few wires. The world is suddenly brighter, clearer, sharper. Behind you is a massive metal door you don’t remember existing until just now.

Beneath you is the chewed corpse of a person.

Not Personnel.

A human person.

You feel sick again, backing away from the mess you’ve made. You expect your back end to hit the wall, but it never does, instead you just sink ever further into something dark and almost liquid. You float here, as if this pool of blackness WERE a liquid. It’s quiet here, and lonely.

But in a good way. 

You crawl all the way in and turn this way and that, the attempted eating of that Personnel person is instantly forgotten as you go in one shadow and out of another. You’re somewhere beyond that big door, in a corridor you don’t recognize.

This place is deserted, and loud. The alarms haven’t stopped.

Something tells you that you have to get out of here, now if possible. The other Personnel aren’t going to like that you just killed one of their colleagues. 

The Sentries find you first, you’ve been trailing blue from your shoulder this entire time. The drops look like flares on the ground. They seem smaller somehow, but no less dangerous. They charge you like bulls, snarling and barking. You retreat into the safety of the shadows and watch with detached amusement as those dumb roid-raging mutts slam face first into your little window out of the shadows as if it was just a wall there. You slither up and over their heads, continuing on your way while they sniff the shadows in confusion. 

Up up up you climb, until you can climb no further, your progress barred by a brightly lit hallway full of people with guns and funny bulky clothes. Guards? Soldiers? It doesn’t really matter, now does it?

You make yourself long and many limbed, slithering across the ceiling rapidly. You are, of course, shot at. A majority of the bullets miss you and hit the overhead lights, however, plunging the hallway into darkness.

From then on, you are only glimpsed in muzzle fire as you tear each and every one of the guards limb from limb. 

You don’t find any joy in this, you just want to leave. 

They want you dead.

Kill or be killed.

You squeeze yourself into an empty elevator shaft when you are done and continue your upward trek. You’re bleeding, from many bullet wounds, but you can hardly register the pain, the all consuming need to leave this place is probably the only thing keeping you conscious and moving.

The next floor you find is full of frantic scientists, clutching guns, gathering or destroying papers. Some go as far as to shoot their own computers.

There are too many for you to take in this condition, so you slink through the dark places. Puddle jumping between the shadows cast by pieces of furniture, or once again across the ceiling when you are able. 

“Fuck fuck fuck FUCK!” laments a voice you recognize. It’s one of the scientists from the procedure that turned you into this thing. You linger in the shadows above her like a spider in its web. She’s saying something to her equally stressed colleagues. Something about ‘resistance’ and ‘Merlin’. You don’t know what those words mean, nor do you care to find out. You just hang there, slowly dropping lower and lower as your rage goes from embers to flame.

She did this to you.

She turned you into this FREAK.

Your mouth opens before you can stop it, a line of glowing drool dangling from your teeth, landinging on her shoulder. The last thing she sees, before she truly ceases to exist from the neck up, is teeth and darkness.

Her colleagues have the presence of mind to run when her headless corpse succumbs to gravity. You spit her out, and scuttle away on way more legs than anything should ever have. 

Anything that gets in the way of your freedom finds itself in bloody pieces soon enough. You’re tired and angry, hurt and afraid. You just want to get out before you end up like the others in those little rooms.

The last floor, the ground floor, is chaos. The bullet riddled corpses of fellow specimens and masked strangers lay haphazardly across the ground, along with broken equipment and crates of supplies. You don’t look at the faces of the dead specimens, for fear you’ll recognize someone. 

Movement catches your eye, people just outside the doors dragging crates and carrying people to big trucks. You lurch forward, whatever energy that has propelled your future corpse this far is starting to wane. By the time you reach the broken glass doors, you have become almost normal again. Your beastly features melt away with the adrenaline that’s been urging you on, so you don’t open that door so much as you kind of fall through it.

You crawl towards the trucks as gunfire thunders in your ears, echoing off of the downbeat of the endless alarms and the baritone barks of rampaging Sentries, soon sent to hell by a rain of bullets fired from the people in the trucks. They shout to each other over the noise with practiced ease, like they’ve done this all a thousand times. 

One of them spots you in the chaos and hops from the relative safety of their truck. As soon as their feet hit the ground, someone else is following them, and someone else is covering the both of their asses with much needed cover fire.

They drag you to your feet and bolt back to the truck.

You can’t keep your eyes open.

You’ve lost too much blood.

The moment the three of you are in the truck, it speeds off in a cloud of dust and bullets. Someone is trying to stop the bleeding, but the others are cheering, singing, screaming with cocky joy.

“We are the champions, my friends,” someone calls in a voice gone hoarse from shouting, but still, they’re singing. The other masked strangers join in, hesitantly at first, but soon they’re an off-key choir of victory. And the last thing you see, before you tumble headlong into blissful unconsciousness is on of your rescuers pointing their middle finger back they way you came, loudly proclaiming, “No time for losers, ‘cause we are the champions of the world.”


End file.
